I'm an angel investor in Ad.ly, so I'm not 100% aware of everything going on there, but I at least thought I'd chime in.
First, Ad.ly wants to make sure the ads stay high-quality. That's why they have pretty strict rules that everything must be marked as an ad, nothing is written in the first person, everything must be approved by publishers, etc. It makes it harder--as Gabriel saw. They're working on ways to make publisher approval better (there is an email that is sent to handle approvals; I'll ask the ad.ly guys if there's an unusual error rate).
Second, I know they're working on lots of tools to make it easier to choose appropriate publishers. Everyone wants to use different metrics for how they choose, so it's a tricky problem, but the feedback is useful. Pricing is based on several measures of influence, and they tend to correlate well with CTR from what I understand.
As Gabriel noted, the CPC is usually significantly better than almost any other high-quality ad network. So, it's cost-effective on a click basis. I hope with the tools to get volume as well, they'll make it easy to get volume.
Pick a few people and maybe create special profiles that come up when someone searches for them. Have the profiles feature a headshot, Twitter profile, Facebook page, website, etc as the top search result (a bit like Google's World Cup stuff - http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=brett+holman).
Make them interesting enough that when the people in question find out about them, they want to show their friends.
Find some way of notifying them, either through a Google search or ad, or even just contact them and explain that you're interested to know what they think about the profiles idea. (In truth, you will have chosen them specifically because they talk/post fairly often to a broad audience.) Make sure they know that you're fine with them publicising the link, it's not secret or anything - in fact, the more feedback the better. They might be more likely to spread the word if they feel that they've been chosen ("I wanted to choose some of the best designers around to get initial feedback.").
If not profiles, find some other way of presenting DDG that is unique to them. You probably don't want to follow in Google's semi-aborted footsteps of mimicking Bing's background image, but that could be a way of getting designers on side - background or masthead or sidebar. "Hey guys, I got picked to design one of Duck Duck Go's unique mastheads - they're the new Google. Check it out here..."
(Thinking aloud.)
Of course, you'd want to be honest with the feature you were involving them in (not a masthead that'd never be used live, etc). Otherwise, it reminds me of a publicity method some dodgy guy I knew wanted to try. Build a site for a start-up and then email thousands of web developers asking for quotes to redevelop the site (then never proceed with the project). Then email thousands of accountants and explain your business and say you need help with your accounts and ask if they take on this sort of work, but never follow through. And then thousands of office cleaners, and IT supply companies, and graphic design companies and caterers (to cater your launch party, of course), removalists and so on.
But I haven't ever written anyone about them. I know people search for their names, so I can only imagine they are not compelling enough right now to share. Not sure if there is a way to make them so.
I think it shows how immature a platform is when a customer does all of the data crunching that the host should do for you:
1. Downloading the full list of top influential twitter users from trst.me (~22K users).
2. Hacking ad.ly's URLs and then downloading a big list of people you can advertise with.
3. Cross checking with the trst.me list to only keep top influencers.
4. Cross checking that output with the twitter API to only keep people recently retweeted.
5. Taking that subset and downloading ad.ly info including price, followers, & avg tweets.
6. Filter out people > 10 tweets/day and then sort by price/follower count.
(Granted this is what I do with Google Adwords and Adsense all the time, but you would never see me calling them immature [or maybe just complacent?])
Being one of the people that Gabe sent the ad request to - i can attest ot the fact that the adly spend rates are just not good enough to present value for money.
There's a very high threshold in which i'm willing to take money (say, 3-4 figures minimum) to advertise a product via twitter -- you simply lose followers.
Also, now that people are following more than 1000s of tweets per day, you simply cannot pay attention to it all unless you are focused on twitter 100% all day.
So it's not worth an advertiser spending money on advertising either.
Gabe- ping me back, i have some experience about clickthru when celebs tweet your stuff.
Why does the first table have 71 clicks, but the second has 20? While the cost looks like it might be $31.88 in the second table, but only $24.83 in the first one? I ask because the re-tweet experiment got 73 clicks, and the relative performance is potentially interesting.
Twitter can't really stop them. If I tweet out "I love Pepsi" twitter doesn't really know if I was paid to say that or not. The existence of the "(ad)" part of the tweet is just a courtesy.
Selling out is probably as old as society. :-)
They could try to block ad.ly from the API which I assume they use to get metrics about users, but ad.ly could just then buy those metrics from some other company or scrape them themselves.
That's what I thought too based on all the press (TC, RRW, Mashable), but the next day Twitter clarified that sites like Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets aren't in violation. Their change was aimed at services that show the Twitter stream intermixed with ads based on the content that aren't from Twitter. Since Twitter is rolling out their whole "in stream ads" platform that app developers can use soon, this seems to target that - and other places that try to target ads based on the surrounding Tweets. (note: I work on SponsoredTweets, so we've obviously been watching this closely. :)
First, Ad.ly wants to make sure the ads stay high-quality. That's why they have pretty strict rules that everything must be marked as an ad, nothing is written in the first person, everything must be approved by publishers, etc. It makes it harder--as Gabriel saw. They're working on ways to make publisher approval better (there is an email that is sent to handle approvals; I'll ask the ad.ly guys if there's an unusual error rate).
Second, I know they're working on lots of tools to make it easier to choose appropriate publishers. Everyone wants to use different metrics for how they choose, so it's a tricky problem, but the feedback is useful. Pricing is based on several measures of influence, and they tend to correlate well with CTR from what I understand.
As Gabriel noted, the CPC is usually significantly better than almost any other high-quality ad network. So, it's cost-effective on a click basis. I hope with the tools to get volume as well, they'll make it easy to get volume.